


This Changing Light

by Glinda



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Boats and Ships, Eilean Siar, Families of Choice, Gen, Home, Introspection, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Trains, Travel, finding yourself, non biological siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 23:11:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4498302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of CA: TWS, Natasha goes in search of a past she can live with and finds a little peace to take home with her again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Changing Light

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to so much Deacon Blue while writing this story. I’d apologise for the references to _Under the Skin_ but I loved that movie, I have no regrets. Written mostly on the platform at Kyle of Lochalsh station (looking out over the harbour to Broadford on Skye) and on the train back from Kyle to Inverness.

There’s a girl on the platform. She’s sitting on a bench eating chips and there’s absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about her. That in itself should be suspicious, no one is quite as ordinary as she seems. But if you spoke to her, she would respond in almost flawless English, albeit with a heavy Eastern-European accent that you can’t quite place, and the occasional word that broadens out into a more local dialect – highlighting vocabulary acquired since her arrival here. You’ll presume she’s just nervous of people’s judgement of her migrant status, or bunking off work for a rare bit of afternoon sun. Perhaps even that her work visa has run out, that she’s grown fond of this place and is worried it won’t be renewed, that someone will find out and she’ll be sent back. (That’ll she’ll lose her hard-won chance at building a better life.) The lashings of mayonnaise on her chips will just be a European eccentricity. That’s if you speak to her. Chances are she’ll have finished her chips by the time you notice her and have moved on to eating the punnet of strawberries she’s having for dessert. You’ll be distracted by how much she’s enjoying those strawberries, by how much you’d like some too – perhaps you’ll even turn away to avoid thinking about how much you’d like to share hers) and afterwards if you remember her at all, it will be as a pretty girl eating strawberries in the sun. You might notice that she gets off the train at a tiny request stop in the middle of nowhere and wonder what strawberry girl does out here, but it won’t linger any more than your brief thoughts about the bloke leaning out of the window of his cottage by the tracks an hour later. You won’t remember, because she was so very ordinary, hardly worth noticing, never mind remembering. You’d be wrong, but you’ll never know that. 

~

The deck heaves as the fishing boat is tossed around in the lea of the storm. The small figure hefting the buckets moves steadily across the deck, feet planted firmly despite the rolling swell. With scraggly hair pulled off their face with an elastic band and baggy, grubby, luminous overalls on, the figure could be any age between 20 and 50 and either gender. Only the slightness of the figure gives any hint of their gender from this distance. Up close she’s a strong, sturdy woman with calloused hands and steady feet, who can read navigation charts and haul laden fishing nets with the best of them. Her name isn’t on the crew roster and if she doesn’t appear when they leave port again they won’t go looking for her. Most of the crew – whether their mother tongue is Tagalog or Gaelic - know what its like to travel half way round the world for the chance of work or a better life. They don’t grudge her a second chance of her own. (Whether her demons are flesh and blood or psychological, they understand the need to escape.) They turn a blind eye and their faces to the Atlantic wind. 

In port the woman helps clean up once the catch has gone ashore. On the harbour-side a gangly youth looks speculatively up at them – she wonders what he’s after until one of her colleagues notices and gestures at the next boat with his thumb. The boy nods his thanks and moves along. She watches subtly as she works, as coded negotiations take place, she doesn’t need to speak the language or see the roll of notes flung one way and the anonymous package lobbed in the other direction to recognise a drug deal. When she looks up again her colleague is watching her, she raises an eyebrow and he shrugs.

“No immigration checks, no customs and excise either. Fuck all else to do here in winter.”

She nods her acknowledgement, its May and the skies are grey, the rain light but invasive and the wind no less biting for all they’re no longer on the open ocean. She reckons Winter in this place might give the Russian winters of her childhood a run for their money in terms of bleakness. She also appreciates his unspoken sympathy, even if it is misplaced, that unspoken addition hanging in the air – how horrendous must your home be that mine looks like an escape to a better life?

It’s hard work she does on land too, paid worse, but money isn’t her main aim here. It’s invisible though and that’s more important. The Summer wears on and the weather doesn’t improve much – well apparently it does by local standards but America has clearly spoiled her these last few years. She learns that proper sausages are square, that the best descriptor for the weather is dreich and to sigh deeply and say _co-dhiù_ when she wants to change the subject. (Clint will laugh at her when she brings him back ‘tattie scones’ from her travels right up until he eats them and loves them just as much as she knew he would.) She sits on a flat-bed trailer as a tractor pulls her back to town after a weekend helping a colleague’s brother shear his sheep, watching patches of light chase across the slopes of Cliseam and a rain front rolling in from the sea and is hard-pressed to remember a more beautiful sight in nature. Knee-high in crystal clear blue and green water with a beach close-by of sand as soft and clean and white as any Mediterranean island, the coldness of the water feels like a fair trade for having this all to herself. ( _Gorm_ and _liath_ and _ruadh_ , the colours have different boundaries in Gaelic than in English, ones that fit the landscape better. She treasures the feel of the words in her mouth and remembers her own struggle to view _си́ний_ and _голубо́й_ as shades of blue rather than the separate colours of her childhood.) Sometimes it feels as if the rain is seeping into her bones, into her soul, scouring her clean of the taint of the previous months. 

~

Nothing lasts forever, of course, and she does actually have some real work to do. She finally gets the lead on her target that drags her reluctantly back to the mainland. It was smart to avoid the cities where half the world’s security services were looking for him. Train travel was a good move too, except when you’re regularly travelling a line with only three trains a day and getting off at a request stop, the conductors are going to start recognising you. The fact that he’d allowed it to reach that stage without relocating suggested either a staggering level of arrogance or a somewhat clumsy trap. She took her own precautions ahead of time but in the end she needn’t have worried. The agency happily sent her to the job when she mentioned having seen the advert and how charming the little request stop was. It wasn’t until she pulled the gun on him that he actually looks at her properly and realised what was happening. 

After that it is easy enough to fake a home invasion ( _housebreaking_ – nothing needs to be taken, though she did liberate some useful paperwork) and to be sitting smudged and sobbing on the platform when the next train arrived. 

“I just want to go home,” she tells the police officer when they’re done.

“Where’s home,” the officer asks, kindly. 

“I don’t know anymore,” Natasha tells her with more honestly than she intends. She lets herself think though, for the first time since the Treskillion, of a farmhouse in rural Ohio. Of Clint’s endless DIY projects and Laura’s laughter and sarcasm and terribly ordinary work anecdotes. Of Cooper and Lila, climbing trees and playing video games, curling up on either side of her on the sofa demanding she tell them one more bedtime story. She turns the thought and the word round and round in her head for a while to see how it fits. “My…brother and his wife, they live in Ohio," she offers hesitantly. 

The officer nods encouragingly, “might be worth a visit once this is all over.”

Natasha nods, but the thought lingers, will it ever be over?

~

There’s a dead man waiting for her at Waverly station when she gets off the train from Inverness

Actually there are two, one of them is stuffed into a left luggage locker and the boy on duty will be very surprised when he clears out the uncollected tickets and finds him. The other dead man is actually upright and breathing, and disposed of the first one for her. Natasha is still in character, so when he opens his arms in a welcome gesture, she steps into the embrace and allows herself to cling a little to her sometime mentor. She allows herself strictly 30 seconds of listening to his steady heartbeat before she lets go. They don’t mention it – or the protective way his hand had cradled her skull for a long moment back there - as they debrief and discuss next moves, under the cover of cheerful Russian. They interrogate some sources in scabby flats on the edge of Leith – where the gentrification hasn’t quite reached yet – and afterwards share stories of stakeouts and karaoke competitions while downstairs some drunken students massacre songs about _the smell of cheap cigars and the hope of cheap perfume_. And somewhere in the comfortable darkness as they wait for the dawn, watching neon lights dance on the wet pavement, Natasha begins to hope that she might be able to have it all after all. 

(In the morning – several days and far too little sleep later – she will wake on the comfiest sofa in the world with two warm bundles using her as a pillow. She watches beams of autumn sun slant across the floor, while someone clatters around in the kitchen, getting the coffee on and grumbling at her for not waking them when she got home. She’ll take out her stories of the last few weeks, sand off the grime and the blood and the isolation, and tell age appropriate stories to her partner’s children about her holiday adventures on some beautiful islands in the North Atlantic.)

In the meantime, she takes last watch and watches the sun come up over another city – remembering another rooftop and a sky that was barely dark for an hour a night, and when the job is done she will tell Nick she’s away home and he’ll smile at her turn of phrase and tell her he’ll see her soon. And she’ll go home.

**Author's Note:**

> Why the Tagalog speaking fishermen? [Polaris](http://www.scottishdocinstitute.com/films/polaris/) a short film from a couple of years ago about the Filipino fishermen of Fraserburgh. The drug deal is based on an anecdote a Leodhasach friend of mine told me.


End file.
